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Subject: Re: Q&A with Feng-Hsiung Hsu

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 15:24:24 10/16/02

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On October 16, 2002 at 09:40:21, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

Is Schach 3.0, one of the participants in Aegon 1997
a good enough program for you to measure branching
factor?

It was one of the deepest searching and fastest PC programs
in 1997.

Want to use that as a 'standard'?

Note that it uses nullmove ANd hashtables ANd singular
extensions.

Good to use it as a standard isn't it?

Shall i produce some outputs for you with it at my K6-300
laptop? I can run it for days if you want to...



>On October 16, 2002 at 07:31:01, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On October 15, 2002 at 13:31:07, James Swafford wrote:
>>
>>There is 2 things
>>
>>  a) theoretic branching factor without nullmove
>>
>>that's true for the last so many plies of deep blue and
>>the theoretic truth.
>>
>>  b) branching factor with hashtable.
>>
>>You will see that deep blue is somewhere, like all software programs
>>in the middle of this.
>>
>>126 mln nodes a second. And it got like 12 ply with a bit more
>>than 3 minutes.
>>
>>that's like total branching factor =  12th root from
>>126 mln * 180 seconds = 6.0
>
>If you mean (180*126m)^(1/12), that equals 7.294.
>
>>So the real overall b.f. which was achieved was 6.0
>>
>>that's lower than the theoretic branching factor of sqrt(40^18)
>
>If a decent program didn't have a lower number than the 'theoretic branching
>factor...' I'd be very surprised.
>
>BUT, if you insist on this number, and you think they only got 12 plies, they
>need to search 4096000000 nodes for 12 plies.  They can accomplish that in 32.5
>seconds with 126M n/s.  12.2 plies takes 47 seconds.  In 180 seconds, they can
>do 12.93 plies, in fact.  sqrt(40) is a branching factor of 6.32.  With a
>branching factor of 6, they can reach 13.3 plies in 180 seconds based upon your
>formula.
>
>Are you going to claim now their branching factor was above 7 just so that it
>can fit your formula, when you can calculate it directly from the logfiles and
>find out it was less even than 6?
>
>>Reality is that deep blue's b.f. is looking worse than it is because of
>>2 things
>>  a) the incredible overhead from hardware
>>  b) the huge inefficiency from parallel search, estimations of 10% out of
>>     the total nodes of 126MLN a second which it got on average is not
>>     very realistic still IMHO.
>
>You're completely misinterpreting their data.  They give estimation of around
>10% total efficiency (8%/12% in tactical/non-tactical positions) on the 480
>processor machine.  This means they were getting average speedup of 48 over a
>single-processor machine.  We can tell this because they compare to numbers on
>the 24-processor machine:  "For positions with many deep forcing sequences
>speedups averaged about 7, for an observed efficiency of about 30%.  For quieter
>positions, speedups averaged 18, for an observed efficiency of 75%."
>As you can see, 7/24 = 29.2%, and 18/24 = 75%.  With a total average speedup of
>about 48 on the big machine, you can calculate that their serial node rate would
>have been a little over 100M (2.2m x 48).  Amazingly, this is about the same as
>the theoretical peak (1000M) times the same 10% efficiency mentioned.
>
>In case you want to recalculate the branching factors based on 100m instead of
>126m nodes/sec, 6.93^12.2 / 100m is 180.69 seconds.  Still way too high of a
>branching factor.  Using 6, which is still too high, you get a little over 13
>plies at that node rate in 3 minutes.



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